Zambezi Express

For the last six months, my life has been one long chain of extraordinary coincidences. I applied for a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to write a book about the history of the railways in Africa because that is what I really wanted to do, knowing that Winnie had been captured by the Boers on an armoured train in South Africa, but not knowing at that stage that he had followed much of my intended journey himself, writing one of the definitive histories of the Desert Railway in Sudan.

As a side project in Kenya, I am doing some articles on a Kenyan soap opera, Makutano Junction (road not rail – that would be too neat), but the central character turns out to be called Winston.

I have talked to colleagues who turn out to have written books and articles on sections of my trip that they have offered to lend me (including bizarrely an article published in Mayfair). One friend told me that her great-grandfather helped build one of the railways and his notebooks are still in her attic.

When I saw the advertisement for Zambezi Express, a new musical coming into London, starring the Sibayayi dance troop from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, the country where I grew up and based around a boy who leaves for the ‘big city’ on the train, I knew I had to have a ticket. That night at the Riverside Studios, watching a high energy performance that left the audience on its knees, I went with Mark, my very English partner, a passionate devotee of steam trains (he drives them as a hobby) and Kathy, one of my oldest friends from Zimbabwe, a woman I have known for 40 years. It felt circular – as though my new life and my old life had come together – Africa and England were merging. It was a joyous opening number for my steel safari.